AT&T Union Workers Ratify 16th Straight Deal

Unionized workers in AT&T’s wired Internet business narrowly approved a new three year contract, the telecommunications giant said on Monday.

Some 2,000 workers voted 54% to 45% in favor of the agreement that includes modest wage gains for most, the Communications Workers of America union disclosed.

AT&T has had a long run of successfully negotiated deals with the CWA, even after its member workers at Verizon went out on a seven week strike earlier this year and won improved pay and job security. In August, 40,000 workers in AT&T’s wireless business approved a four-year benefits contract, the first major telecom workers contract ratified since the Verizon vz strike ended. The last major strike at AT&T occurred in 2012, though it lasted only two days.

The carrier has agreed to 19 contract deals with the CWA and International Brotherhood of Electrical workers since the beginning of 2015, AT&T said in a statement. So far, workers have ratified 16 of those contracts.

The new tentative agreement with AT&T’s Internet workers ends a somewhat contentious negotiation. The workers voted in July to authorize a strike after the carrier proposed freezing wages for three years and increasing workers’ contributions for health care coverage. But AT&T t eventually agreed to make concessions on wages.

The tentative deal includes general wage increases, with some of the largest gains for those at the bottom of the pay scale, the CWA said. The two lowest paid job titles, Internet assistants and customer assistants, will get pay increases of $5,000 to $8,100 over the three year contract. Other workers will get a 7.7% raise over the three years.

U.K. Tribunal Says Uber Drivers Deserve Workers’ Rights

Uber should no longer treat its drivers as self-employed, a British tribunal ruled on Friday, in a decision that threatens the taxi app’s business model by forcing it to pay the minimum wage and offer holiday entitlement.

Two drivers brought their case to a British employment tribunal in July, arguing the rapidly expanding app, which allows users to book and pay for a taxi by smartphone, was acting unlawfully by not providing certain employment rights.

The decision could also affect thousands of others who work for firms, including meal delivery services such as Deliveroo, that are part of the so-called “gig economy,” where individuals work for multiple employers day to day without having a fixed contract.

“This is a monumental victory that will have a hugely positive impact on drivers … and for thousands more in other industries where bogus self-employment is rife,” said Maria Ludkin, legal director at the GMB union that brought the case.

Uber, which is valued at $62.5 billion (48 billion pounds) and whose investors include Goldman Sachs and GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, has faced protests, bans and legal action around the world.

The San Francisco-based ride service had argued that its more than 40,000 drivers in Britain enjoy the flexibility of being able to work when they choose and receive on average much more than the minimum wage.

Uber said it will appeal.

“While the decision of this preliminary hearing only affects two people, we will be appealing it,” Uber’s UK general manager Jo Bertram said.

South Dakota Could Be First State to Pass Transgender ‘Bathroom Bill’

South Dakota is on the cusp of becoming the first state in the nation to require public school students to use facilities like bathrooms based on their “chromosomes and anatomy” at birth. The so-called “bathroom bill,” which passed the state House in late January and is being debated by the Senate Tuesday, marks a revival of the charged fights that played out in states across the country in 2015.

At least five other states have considered similar “bathroom bills” this session, and scores of other measures that LGBT rights advocates consider discriminatory are pending in legislatures around the U.S. Among them are variations on a proposal that exploded in Indiana last year, when controversy over a so-called religious freedom law became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over religious belief and legal equality. The Hoosier State’s measure led to an estimated $60 million in lost revenue, and after weeks of economic and political pressure, Indiana Governor Mike Pence approved revisions to the law clarifying that businesses couldn’t use it to turn away LGBT patrons.

To many supporters, these bills are necessary to protect deeply held religious beliefs and are worth the controversy and lost revenue. To critics, however, the measures serve as a reminder that the lessons of the Indiana fight were fleeting.

“There’s a bit of amnesia,” says Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The original plan was to make sure marriage equality wouldn’t be legal. You don’t have to scratch very far beneath the surface to see that these bills are about eroding LGBT equality.”

The battle over bathrooms

The fight in South Dakota echoes earlier clashes over the gender identity and bathroom use of transgender people. The sponsor of the South Dakota bathroom measure, state Rep. Fred Deutsch, has argued in committee testimony that it is necessary to protect the “bodily privacy rights” of “biologic boys and girls” and that transgender students should be offered alternate accommodations if they do not wish to use the facilities that correspond to their sex assigned at birth (Deutsch did not respond to TIME’s request for an interview.)

Though the bill does not specify what those accommodations would be, schools that have dealt with conflicts over bathroom use have often instructed transgender students to use staff or nurse facilities, or facilities in buildings separate from their peers. The Department of Justice has issued several rulings and opinions that say such treatment of transgender students amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX, though federal courts are still weighing the issue.

“This bill causes actual harm to transgender students, an already vulnerable population,” says Libby Skarin, the ACLU’s South Dakota policy director, who has testified against the bill. “It singles out and targets them and attempts to isolate them, in a way that is really truly hurtful and discriminatory.”

Rebecca Dodds, the mother of a transgender son who recently graduated from high school in the state’s famed Black Hills, said compelling students to use a separate facility could force them to out themselves to their peers, which could lead to harassment or violence.

“For my son, I wouldn’t want him to go to school as a boy and be questioned by other students about why he can’t just go to the bathroom with the other boys,” she says. “He was afraid to tell me and I’m his mom … It’s really awful to think about your child being the one that they’d say, ‘Okay, everybody, go to the locker room—but not you.’”

Before he came out, Dodds says, the prospect of having to use the girls’ room was so uncomfortable that he would just not go to the bathroom at school. She didn’t know that at the time, and Dodds was perplexed about why her child was repeatedly getting urinary tract infections and other related health problems. “My son has dealt with social isolation and doesn’t particularly like his own body,” she says. “To think he would be some kind of threat to other kids is really absurd.”

Speaking in support of the bathroom bill, a representative from South Dakota Citizens for Liberty said the measure offers a good compromise: “It allows for the sensitive accommodation of students who are experiencing personal trials,” Florence Thompson testified at a hearing of the Senate education committee on Feb. 11. “And does so without giving preferential treatment to a tiny segment of the student population at the expense of the privacy rights of the vast majority.”

Religious freedom and discrimination

Another measure being considered in South Dakota serves as an example of the new surge of religious freedom bills. It has more than three dozen co-sponsors, and, after passing unanimously in the House, is awaiting further action in the Senate. It extends protections for people with three moral beliefs that are laid out in the bill’s text:

(1) Marriage is or should only be recognized as the union of one man and one woman
(2) Sexual relations are properly reserved to marriage
(3) The terms male or man and female or woman refer to distinct and immutable biological sexes that are determined by anatomy and genetics by the time of birth.

While critics worry about such bills being used to turn away LGBT people from housing, jobs or businesses, they also worry it could open the door to a broader insertion of personal morality in the public sphere. A pharmacist might, for instance, refuse to fill a birth control prescription for an unmarried woman or a child care agency might refuse to look after a boy or girl with gay parents, without risk of losing their state licenses.

The fight has played out at the state level largely because there is no federal law that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The Equality Act, a federal bill that would create such protections, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress. Meanwhile, the majority of states lack LGBT non-discrimination laws, although a bill in Pennsylvania will likely add sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s non-discrimination protections.

As in Indiana, the embrace of LGBT-inclusive policies by many major corporations could help determine whether these religious freedom and bathroom measures become law. In Georgia, where lawmakers are considering at least four religious freedom bills, a group of businesses—including Coca-Cola, AT&T and Delta—has formed to promote “inclusive” policies, explicitly mentioning sexual orientation and gender identity as qualities that should be respected.

In South Dakota, dollars and cents may determine whether the bathroom bill passes too, with the ACLU arguing that the passage of such a law would put the state in direct conflict with federal policy—and therefore all but guarantee costly litigation for school districts that are forced to choose one or the other. Failing to comply with guidance from the Department of Education, which has said that students’ gender identities must be respected, could run the risk of costing local districts hundreds of millions in federal funds.

Yet supporters like Deutsch say that the guidance coming from the federal government is the reason such bills are needed, so that South Dakota won’t be pressured into providing facility access for transgender students that is not yet explicitly laid out in federal law. “I know it stimulates lots of passion, there’s nothing I can do about that,” he said in a Senate committee hearing. “If you have boy anatomy, you use boy facilities. If you have girl anatomy, you use girls facilities. And if you’re a transgender student, schools make local decisions to provide you the best reasonable accommodations that they can come up with.”

Andi Owen, Global President for Banana Republic, wrote in the post that the company’s efforts to phase out on-call scheduling—in which employees are required to be ready to work a shift, but may have their hours cancelled because of customer demand—began this summer and that all of its stores will eliminate the practice by the end of September 2015.

“Additionally, each of our brands has committed to improving their scheduling policies to provide their store employees with at least 10 to 14 days notice. The majority of brands will be rolling out these new policies in September, and all Gap Inc. brands are committed to phasing in advanced schedules by early 2016,” Owen wrote.

The practice “really blocks the day out for a worker,” Schneiderman said at the time. “They can’t schedule another job; they can’t schedule child care. This is something that we have to deal with. It’s a growing problem.”

A Quinnipiac University poll found that 73% of voters in New York City support raising the minimum wage for fast food workers earning $15 per hour. Fifty-three percent of Republican respondents oppose the wage and residents on Staten Island are divided 48-47% on the issue, but every other party, gender, age, racial, or borough group supports the wage by wide margins.

A majority of New York City voters—57%—say they would be in favor of paying more for fast food so that workers could earn more. Interestingly enough, the same poll found only 33% of New York City voters consider the quality of life in the city “very good” or “good,” which is the lowest number ever recorded by Quinnipiac.

While the poll revealed support for the $15 minimum wage in New York City, it didn’t measure sentiment throughout the rest of the state. That’s worth noting because the $15 minimum wage applies to all fast food workers in the state (so long as they work for a chain with at least 30 locations), and as research earlier this week revealed, a $15 per hour wage that covers multiple metropolitan areas is not felt equally.

The ongoing push for higher wages in the United States has been piecemeal—state by state, city by city. On Wednesday, the New York State wage board took that incrementalism to the next level, recommending a new $15 per hour minimum wage just for the state’s fast food workers at restaurants with more than 30 locations.

While a final decision is pending (and likely to be a yes vote by the state labor commissioner), the board’s move brings the fast food worker protests full circle. Employees of fast food restaurants first walked off the job in New York City in November 2012 to demand higher wages, specifically $15 per hour. That single demonstration grew into coordinated strikes across the nation and ultimately reached a global scale. The wage board’s recommendation would give fast food workers in New York State a separate minimum wage for the first time. The $15 per hour pay—effective in New York City in 2019 and elsewhere in the state in July 2021—will be a 70% increase from fast food workers’ current minimum wage of $8.75, the statewide rate.

The new minimum wage is unique because it circumvents the legislative process—the state empowers the labor commissioner or a wage board to access whether pay for a particular job is sufficient—and because it contributes to a growing trend of minimum wage hikes that apply only to a specific sector of a state or city’s economy.

“This is the low hanging fruit model,” says Tom Juravich, professor of labor studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. “You work politically where you have opportunities.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed raising the minimum wage for fast food workers in May with an op-ed in The New York Times. He wrote that “nowhere is the income gap more extreme and obnoxious than in the fast-food industry.” But Cuomo’s targeting of fast food workers through the wage board process came after the state legislature failed to support his effort to raise the overall minimum wage to $11.50 in New York City and $10.50 elsewhere in the state. (New York’s current minimum wage is set to increase from $8.75 to $9 at the end of the year.)

“These are strategic decisions by [worker] activists,” Juravich says. When they see a political opening, they take it. It’s a something-is-better-than-nothing approach. “It’s not that they’re saying other [workers] don’t deserve more money, it’s just that they have a foot in the door,” he says.

Once worker activists break down a door in one industry, they hope to go onto the next, Juravich says. That domino effect will get a jolt if—say a few years from now—an industry-specific minimum wage hike has not caused catastrophic consequences in terms of employment. In that sense, sectorial minimum wage hikes are just another aspect of the incremental movement for higher pay that’s sweeping the nation as a comprehensive wage hike fails at the federal level.

Right on cue, the Fight For $15 organization that’s backed by the SEIU released a statement Wednesday championing the wage board decision and announcing that it has protests scheduled to take place in Tampa and a few other cities on Thursday.

In passing the legislation Wednesday, the nation’s most populous city joined a growing cadre of municipalities making the move. As of May, more than 100 cities had passed “Ban the Box” or “Fair Chance” laws, which eliminate the check box on job applications asking if jobseekers have been convicted of a crime and bar questions about prior incarcerations until after an employer has made a candidate an offer. Seventeen states have also adopted the measures, including six that enforce the policies at private employers.

Before Wednesday, New York City had banned questions about criminal records from the early stages of the application process for jobs at city contractors and agencies. The new law will apply that rule more broadly to private employers. Once an employer makes a conditional offer to a job candidate, it can run a criminal background check. If the employer decides to then rescind the offer, it must notify the applicant with a written explanation and hold the job open for three days to discuss the situation with the applicant. The law passed the city council with a 45-5 vote and it received support from a notable ex-convict, Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black, a memoir about the 13 months Kerman served in prison on money-laundering charges that is now the basis for the hit Netflix NFLX show by the same name.

The nationwide movement to push further into the hiring process questions about a job candidate’s criminal past is aimed at cutting down on what’s seen as discrimination against the 70 million American adults with criminal records. Early-stage questions about criminal records are also thought to have a disproportionately negative effect on persons of color, who make up more than 60% of the country’s incarcerated population. The majority of employers rely on criminal background checks despite their potentially harmful effects: almost 7 out of 10 companies use them.

Senators: Jimmy John’s workers should not have to sign non-competes

The person making your sandwich should be able to find a new job whenever and wherever he likes.

That sentiment is at the heart of a bill introduced Wednesday by two Senate Democrats, who are seeking a ban on non-compete agreements for low-wage workers.

Non-competes are usually reserved for white collar employees who have access to extensive training, trade secrets, or client databases and could, in theory, take that knowledge to a competitor company. But in recent years, the agreements have popped up in low-wage fields. Sandwich chain Jimmy John’s notably requires some of their restaurant workers and delivery drivers to sign covenants that prohibit them from working for a competitor—defined by Jimmy Johns’s as any business that’s near a Jimmy John’s location and derives 10% of its revenue from sandwiches—for two years following their tenure at the company.

The Mobility and Opportunity for Vulnerable Employees (MOVE) Act, sponsored by Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut and Senator Al Franken from Minnesota, will prohibit the use of non-compete agreements for employees earning less than $15 per hour, $31,200 per year, or the minimum wage in the employee’s municipality. The legislation will also require employers to tell prospective employees that they may be asked to sign such an agreement. The bill will let “workers currently stuck in low-wage positions [seek] higher-paying jobs without having to fear that their current employer will take legal action against them,” according to the senators’ statement, which specifically cited Jimmy John’s noncompetes.

In October, Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter to the Labor Department and Federal Trade Commission asking for an investigation of Jimmy John’s non-compete agreements to determine if the covenants were “anti-competitive and intimidating to workers.” Jimmy John’s did not immediately return a request for comment.

Non-competes in low-wage industries that dissuade workers from seeking better, higher-paying jobs within the same industry are “unfair,” the senators said in their statement, and stifle low-wage workers’ ability to climb out of poverty.

The United States Supreme Court ruled against the apparel chain in a discrimination case brought by a Muslim woman who said the company denied her employment because she wore a hijab. In addition to handing Abercrombie a loss, the court’s ruling provided more clarity as to what knowledge an employer must have to be liable for violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination based on religion.

The case stems back to 2008, when Samantha Elauf, a Muslim woman, applied to work at a Tulsa, Okla. Abercrombie Kids store as a sales associate—or a “model,” as Abercrombie calls the position internally. An assistant store manager who interviewed Elauf wanted to hire her but asked a district manager if Elauf’s hijab would violate Abercrombie’s look policy, which had specific rules for a “model’s” appearance to “ensure [Abercrombie’s] consistent brand message,” according to the retailer’s court filings. The district manager said that Elauf’s headscarf would indeed break the store’s dress code and instructed that she not be hired.

In 2009, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Abercrombie for discrimination on Elauf’s behalf. The jury in that case sided with Elauf and awarded her $20,000 in damages. But the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in October 2013 overturned that verdict after determining that Abercrombie couldn’t be held liable because Elauf never explicitly told the company that she wore her hijab for religious purposes and that she would therefore need an exemption from the company’s dress policy.

The Supreme Court considered whether an employer needs to have explicit knowledge of a person’s religion or merely a suspicion of her need for a religious accommodation in order to be liable for discrimination. Abercrombie had argued that a job applicant cannot claim that she suffered disparate treatment without first showing that an employer has “actual knowledge” of her need for an accommodation.

In a 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court disagreed with Abercrombie. In his opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that “an employer may not make an applicant’s religious practice, confirmed or otherwise, a factor in employment decisions.” Whether or not an employer commits intentional discrimination comes down to motive, regardless of how much an employer knows. “Motive and knowledge are separate concepts,” he wrote.

An employer that has actual knowledge of a job applicant’s need for an accommodation does not violate Title VII by refusing to hire the candidate if he rejects the candidate for an entirely different reason, the opinion says. “Conversely,” Scalia wrote, “an employer who acts with the motive of avoiding accommodation may violate Title VII even if he has no more than an unsubstantiated suspicion that accommodation would be needed.”

Abercrombie said in a statement on Monday that, while the Supreme Court reversed the Tenth Circuit decision on Monday, “it did not determine that A&F discriminated against Ms. Elauf.” The company “remains focused on ensuring the company has an open-minded and tolerant workplace environment for all current and future store associates,” according to the statement.

The company also said that it has made significant enhancements to its store associate policies, including replacing the “look policy” with a new dress code that “allows associates to be individualistic.” Abercrombie said that it has changed its hiring practices “to not consider attractiveness.” In April, Abercrombie also announced plans to overhaul its image, including efforts to tone down its racy ads and marketing campaigns, promote more diversity, refer to store workers as “brand representatives” instead of models, and improve its customer service.

The Supreme Court’s decision said that the Tenth Circuit, in siding with Abercrombie, had misinterpreted Title VII’s requirements, and it remanded the case back to the lower court for further consideration consistent with Monday’s ruling.

NYC nail salon workers sue over minimum wage, overtime violations

Two manicurists filed a lawsuit on Thursday against four New York City nail salons on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and two salon owners for failing to pay workers the minimum wage and overtime. The manicurists want to represent other technicians, estheticians, masseuses, and beauticians who have also experienced such violations by the salons going as far back as six years.

The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Federal Court, claims that manicurist Blanca Fernandez worked at two of the salons between 2007 and 2013 for a flat fee of $60 for work days that typically lasted ten-and-a-half hours. That means Fernandez was paid just under $6 per hour on average. At the time she worked at the salons, the New York State minimum wage ranged from $7.15 to $7.25 per hour.

The other plaintiff, Gloria Marca, worked at one of the salons as a manicurist and nail technician for part of 2014. During her time there, she earned $55 per day for a ten-and-a-half hour shift, taking home the equivalent of about $5.20 per hour. In 2014, the New York State minimum wage was $8 per hour.

The manicurists also claim that they did not received their required 30-minute meal breaks and were not paid overtime when they worked more than 40 hours in a week. The plaintiffs and members of the proposed class received tips from customers, but the salons never informed the workers that they were counting tips towards the applicable minimum or overtime pay and failed to record the gratuity the workers had received. (Between the hourly rates they’re paid by employers and the gratuity they receive from customers, tipped workers should earn at least a state’s full minimum wage. If they don’t, their employer is supposed to make up the difference.) In the lawsuit, these workers argue that the salons violated the Fair Labor Standards Act’s provisions on the minimum wage, which means the workers are “entitled to the difference between the Act’s minimum wage and the paid cash wages for each hour worked as damages for [the] Defendants’ violations of the [provisions].”

Fortune‘s attempts to reach the two salon owners being sued were unsuccessful.

Earlier this week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo outlined a series of steps the state will take in an attempt to stem the nail salon industry’s abuse of workers.

A state task force will investigate salons individually and will implement new rules that force these businesses to protect technicians from harmful chemicals contained in nail care products by requiring workers to wear gloves and masks. Salons must also post notices that explain to workers that it’s illegal to work without wages or to pay for the opportunity to secure a job. Plus, every nail salon must secure either a bond or expanded insurance policy to cover claims for unpaid wages as part of its licensure, a requirement that’s intended to add a level of accountability to ensure that workers are paid what they’re legally owed.